Philippe Bootz

This kinetic poem is documented as a video recording of its performance, which would require emulation to run correctly on contemporary computers, now 20 years removed from its original computational environments. Its aesthetics are fitting with other works produced by the French digital poetry group L.A.I.R.E. (Lecture, Art, Innovation, Recherche, Écriture) in the late 1980s and pre-WWW years. The poem’s simple design and use of graphical elements shouldn’t be confused with simplicity of expression. Au contraire, its minimalist use of animation, changing color, and scheduled textual delivery are used as writing.

The title itself is an indicator of the poem’s strategies, as it takes a phrase, inverts its syntax to form another, transforming its textual and graphic elements more than once to write more lines over time than the sum total of written lines. Keeping this in mind, use the subtitles as a source of translation of its words, but not necessarily as an accurate depiction of what can be read at a given moment.

This narrative poem in French by Philippe Bootz is generated from constraints and possibilities, tapping into Jean de la Fontaine’s poetry, OULIPO, and the classical unities of Greek drama. Constructed around the concept of a domestic thriller, characters enter and leave a room, in which different events happen, leading to happy or sad endings, and a final comment on the story’s banality or unbearability, leading to the conclusion that one shouldn’t reread it.

This excerpt from Passage, an ambitious work by two e-poetry pioneers, is both theoretically interesting and aesthetically pleasing. As a generated text designed to never be displayed the same way, it cannot be reread the way one can do so with a printed text. At the same time, one can only intuit the logic of its mutability by rereading it with an eye for its variations. And because it is programmed in Director and published as a Shockwave file, we have no access to its source code.

No worries, though: its animation, music, and language combinations are delicately nuanced and intellectually stimulating. There is much pleasure to be found in its variations.